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I know we haven't said anything as far as progress on Pok?mon Serenity goes, but we went on a hiatus ever since school kicked in and between games, homework, swim team, and track, I haven't been able to work much on it. Michael, I lost contact with for awhile, so I don't know much as far as his side goes. Anyway, I got to looking over the source and noticed how a lot of the systems were a bit longer and more complex than they had to be, so this is where I get to what the blog is about.

We're not starting from scratch, but we're completely revamping the NPC discussion, combat, menu and all that jazz. The biggest change is the menu, though. If you remember it being that little box in the upper right, than you will notice(img1) that the menu is now a sidebar, that I will more than likely make condensible. As far as the internal works of the menu, it's a HELLUVA lot shorter. I should of used a child and panes with it from the beginning instead of using individual windows like I had done before.

The NPC discussion(img2) system was something I had wanted to remodel since I first designed it. I didn't like the output for what the NPC's were saying to be down under the map like that. I wanted to use it for a built in HUD(as I did) and use an on-screen display for the NPC discussion.
I originally had the text strings go on a timed scale, but I thought about how it would be nicer to just click a button to continue. I never really used Topic() that much, but I realized that it worked perfect for this, so that's what I did.

I haven't gotten to the combat system yet, but I have some big changes in mind for it.

If you have a recommendation to make a feature better, or for a new feature altogether, feel free to comment. Oh, before I forget. My friend on dA did some new B/W style graphics which I fell in love with so I swapped out the old icons for them.
(img3)